ction
of skilled labor. It takes but a few men to fashion a ton of iron into
bars, but a thousand are not too many to work it into watch-springs.
Five men can make all the coarse pottery used in this District: it takes
five hundred to make its decorated ware and porcelain. Rough hand-labor
is being superseded by machinery. But the demand is greater than ever
before for skilled labor, both to manage the machinery and to take the
product where machinery has left it and fashion it into value by the
art of the decorator. Such a workman plies his handiwork at his own
house, teaching his sons the secrets of his trade. He is the necessary
coadjutor of the machine-owner, and has no need to resort to the brutal
methods of Molly Maguires and trades-unions to get a fair reward for his
labor. Let demagogues rant about our danger from competition with the
_pauper_ labor of Europe! We never were, and never will be, injured by
that. What we should fear is the skilled labor of well-paid, cultured
and educated artisans."

The French, who won so easy a victory over the English in 1851 in the
manufacture of whatever directly augments the luxury and elegance of
life, now fear that England will overcome France on her own ground. An
able Parisian, criticising the Exhibition of 1878, and acknowledging the
facts it reveals, asks the French government to send, at the public
expense, a hundred workmen every year to Great Britain as a means of
keeping French artisans abreast of British and holding their own in the
markets. Ours is not a paternal government. If it should send a hundred
men to England, half of them might be political bummers, whose chief
study would be, not how to learn to work for the benefit of their
countrymen, but how to live without work. The American people are as
individuals supposed to take care of their own business. Do our
trades-unions and labor-clubs and workingmen's associations send a
hundred picked men abroad every year for study and practice? Are they
too conceited or ignorant to realize what most concerns them? Thousands
of foreign subjects are earning money from us, while thousands of our
countrymen are suffering. This is not the fault of those foreign
workmen, nor of the American purchasers of their artistic work, nor of
our government. It is in a great degree because Americans have not the
skill and taste to take up material where machinery leaves it, and lay
it down beautified by the touch of real art. An "appe